Angry IQ Tester: Watson's Critics Are Socialists!

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Angry IQ Tester: Watson's Critics Are Socialists!

"It is a fairly primitive bit of knowledge that in any situation, including scientific research, the observer's bias frequently determines the conclusion," commented reader Andrew Rozsa on the James Watson controversy and my dismissal of science that purports to show racial patterns of biologically-based differences in intelligence. "It's equally well-known that anybody ... can support ANY point of view by cherry-picking "evidence.'"

Rozsa, who claims to have administered thousands of IQ tests all over the United States, along with a laundry list of other cognitive ability tests, is right on both counts. But is he right that Watson's views "are well-supported by OBJECTIVE scientific, ethical, and historical data"?

Rozsa's rebuttal starts with a warning that Steven Rose – the neurobiologist who told the* Daily Telegraph* that no findings of African mental inferiority had survived scientific scrutiny – is "well-known for his socialistic mindbent." He then wonders why I didn't turn to cognition theorist Karl Pribram or The Bell Curve authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray for affirmations of Watson's contentions.

I'm not sure how Pribram fits in this discussion – he's indeed a titan of neuroscience and intelligence theory, but didn't say whether some races were smarter than others. As for Herrnstein and Murray, they stated in The Bell Curve that "the debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved."

Rozsa then invokes Michael Levin's Why Race Matters.I haven't read it, but Rozsa might want to recall his own warning that"the observer's bias frequently determines the conclusion." Personally,I'm skeptical about the conclusions of a man who said that "There's nothing wrong with eugenics. It's a perfectly respectable idea," spoke regularly at meetings of a white nationalist organization and received financial support from the Pioneer Fund, a group founded and sustained by supporters of Nazi eugenics.

Next on Rozsa's recommended reading list is IQ and GlobalInequality, co-written by Richard Lynn – another Pioneer fund scholar\– and a 1994 Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "MainstreamScience on Intelligence." In it, 52 scholars agreed that intelligence can be defined and measured; that IQ tests aren't culturally biased against any subgroup of English-speaking people in the United States;and that "the brain processes underlying intelligence are still little understood" – in other words, that race-based genetics and biology don't have a place in this discussion.

Both Rozsa and the authors of "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" do, however, consider IQ to be a valid measure of "a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience." This is a judgement call. Rozsa thinks IQ tests are a sufficiently comprehensive measurement of "'catching on,' 'making sense of things,' or 'figuring out' what to do." Not everyone agrees with him.Here's a different judgement, from an email written by Osaka University biophysicist Nicholas Smith:

I used to have a basic belief in IQtests (a belief that was quite possibly aided by the fact that I tested quite well on them) and although I understood their theoretical failings, I thought that they basically tested intelligence. I then became friends with a scientist who is my equal or better in terms of usable intelligence, but who continually scores an average or below-average score on standard IQ tests. For a test to be truly valid, it cannot fail in this way. This is anecdotal evidence, but since it is an aberration that breaks the rule, it is sufficient to me.

Smith, unlike Rozsa, doesn't think IQ tests cover the whole spectrum of human ability. I also suspect Smith doesn't think intelligence is terribly important. Not, at least, so important as the most ardent proponents of IQ tests seem to think. How important is intelligence? That's the undercurrent of this entire debate.

Personally, I value decency, humor, empathy and ethicality as much if not more than intelligence. Watson values qualities other than intelligence, too – but he also thinks some conditions are so bad that we might want to make sure that people possessing them don't happen. "If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her," Watson once said.

That's what eugenics is all about. Watson implied that the decision is personal, but eugenicists have have historically tried to make it for others. America's forced sterilization programs – 64,000physically or mentally "disabled" people rendered infertile during the early- to mid-20th century – are an example of this. The Nazis did it too.

It's deeply troubling to me, then, when eugenicists insist that their tests of intelligence are fair and complete, that people of certain ancestries score lower on these tests than everyone else, and that only biology – something people are born with, something unavoidable, something very separate from society or economics or any thing else in life – can explain it.

After all, as Rozsa so rightly says, "anybody ... can support ANY point of view by cherry-picking 'evidence.'"

*Images: Above, early 20th century German eugenics poster, courtesy of University of California, Santa Barbara professor Harold Marcuse.Translation: "The strong carry the weak." **Middle, undated, from the Eugenics Archives. Bottom, Carrie and Emma Buck at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, 1924, fromBetter for All the World. *